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Microsoft is taking an innovative, if somewhat underhanded, approach to promoting its Windows Phone: It's offering a free device to Android customers who've been victims of malware and want an escape.

In a new social media campaign spreading on Twitter with the hashtag "Droidrage," Microsoft is offering a Windows Phone to the "5 best (worst?)" stories of suffering through Android malware. Microsoft's Ben Rudolph (BenThePCGuy on Twitter) spearheaded the contest.

(Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)

Messages to Rudolph on the highly active Twitter feed include: "When you get key-logged on Android and they steal both of your email accounts"; "My whole Samsung phone is malware" and "D'loaded an 'Angry Birds' app from Android Market. Launched it …BOOM! Phone is bricked. Found out it's a fake app."

This last Tweet comes just a day after a crop of fake Android apps was removed from the official Android App Market; the cloned apps were found to be harboring malware that rung up victims' monthly bills by sending premium-rate text messages from their infected phones.

It's a clever marketing ploy, but given Microsoft's less-than-stellar record in keeping its own software free from bugs, it's one that has the possibility of backfiring. As Graham Cluley from the security firm Sophos wrote in a blog post, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

From the Twitter feed, it appears those stones are already being tossed back at Microsoft.

Another reads: "Why would anyone want a BSOD [Blue Screen of Death] on a $$ phone? No Microsoft phone for me, I love Android."

And, of course, there's the obligatory Star Wars joke, made by one respondent: "One time I was waking through the desert on Tatooine, talking on my mobile when R2D2 mugged me. #DroidRage Do I get my free phone now?"